Human evaluation of the content of materials has probably been practiced for longer than any written records. However, the ability to use information associated with a material to understand the properties of associated materials, such as surrounding geologic formations, has been largely developed in the last 100 years, beginning with the Schlumberger brothers' discovery that electric resistivity could be used to evaluate the structure and likely content of geologic structures, and thus provide a mechanism for finding subsurface materials, such as fossil fuel deposits. While a significant advance, resistivity has proven to be of limited utility, especially in modern times in which easy to find petroleum and natural gas deposits are increasingly more difficult to detect with such technology.
Prior technology involving the analysis of rock materials, such as to determine the presence of hydrocarbons in a geologic formation, have focused on the analysis of material in fluid inclusions. Fluid inclusions are often characterized as “bubbles” of fluid trapped within a host material, such as rock. These compartments within rock or other material are usually very small, from 1 to 20 microns across. Fluid inclusions are characterized by being completely sealed and isolated from the environment, typically over very long period of time (on a geologic scale—e.g., over millions of years). The contents of fluid inclusions are believed to be the remnants of the exact fluid associated with the rock material at formation. As such, the content of inclusions can provide information about the fluid composition, temperature and pressure at which a material was formed and what it may contain.
In one type of typical fluid inclusion analyses, a rock sample, usually from a sedimentary rock, is crushed under strong vacuum and the trapped fluids that are released from the crushing are analyzed, such as with a mass spectrometer. Prior to my inventions described herein, the conditions under which mass spectrometers operate have dictated how the devices and methods for fluid inclusion analysis have been performed. Fluid inclusion materials have shown some usefulness in the discovery of hydrocarbon materials and today is a commonly practiced method performed on materials obtained from oil well drilling. However, fluid inclusion analysis also is of limited utility due to a number of issues, such as the content of the inclusion often not matching the present-day fluids in the geologic formation.
Specific patents describing my prior inventions, the inventions of my co-inventors, and other inventors include U.S. Pat. No. 4,960,567, which relates to a method for obtaining gasses from fluid inclusions for analysis through mass spectrometry and U.S. Pat. No. 5,241,859, which describes a method in which material from a collection of fluid inclusions are analyzed to identify collections that are rich in hydrocarbons, which can then be further analyzed, such as through mass spectrometry analysis. U.S. Pat. No. 5,328,849 describes methods for mapping subsurface formations by analyzing fluid inclusions in several samples through specialized devices I also invented.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,661,000 describes an invention made by me and my co-inventors wherein we invented a method for analyzing surface and pore liquids, as opposed to fluid inclusions, by a method in which cuttings or other samples are subjected directly to mass spectrometry analysis under high vacuum. However, one of the shortcomings with that method is the loss of gasses associated with the sample due to the need to apply such relatively high vacuum levels in order to make the devices we invented operate.
The invention provides methods and devices that not only address the limitations of these prior inventions but also greatly expand on them in terms of the applicability of methods to various materials and associated materials, extending well beyond simple analysis of potential hydrocarbon-associated rock samples. These and other advantages of the invention, as well as additional inventive features, will be apparent from the description of the invention provided herein.